Lucidity.cloud Ltd., an Indian startup that helps automate multicloud storage management, said today it has raised $21 million in an early-stage funding round, following rapid growth over the last year.

Today’s Series A round was led by WestBridge Capital and saw participation from existing investor Alpha Wave. It brings the startup’s total funding to $31 million, having previously raised $10 million via a couple of seed investments.

The startup, which likes to be called Lucidity, was founded in 2021 by Nitin Bhadauria (pictured, right) and Vatsal Rastogi (left). It sells a “NoOps” or “no operations” platform that automates the expansion and shrinkage of cloud-based block storage volumes in real time, ensuring companies always have just enough space for their data. By helping to reduce overprovisioning, it reckons, it can save companies as much as 70% on their cloud storage costs.

The platform works with major cloud infrastructure services such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, and can be integrated with any application deployed on those platforms without any code. It can save teams hours of time that would otherwise be spent manually adjusting storage, freeing them up to perform higher-impact work.

According to Bhadauria, Lucidity’s platform is made up of two separate services, including a Storage Auto-Scaler that dynamically reduces and expands block storage on cloud servers. Companies can deploy it as an agent atop of the server, and it will automatically start optimizing the available storage volume in less than an hour.

As for Storage Audit, it’s a free add-on that helps enterprises to determine how much cloud storage space can be freed up, and how much they’re spending on that storage.

Lucidity says it’s growing well at a time when enterprises are migrating more workloads to multicloud environments to enjoy the benefits of scalability, flexibility and lower costs. As a result, the demand for storage optimization is growing. That’s exacerbated by the race to adopt artificial intelligence applications, which require massive volumes of data.

Rather than risk application downtime, many organizations simply overprovision their cloud storage space so they always have enough extra capacity to deal with peaks in demand, but doing so doesn’t come cheap. Though it’s possible to optimize servers to reduce the impact of these costs, many teams avoid doing this for fear of accidental data loss or other problems that can result in downtime.

As a result, organizations are wasting significant amounts of money on storage that’s never used. According to a report by Deloitte Touche Ltd., some companies are wasting up to 30% of their overall cloud spend on this.

WestBridge Capital’s Rishit Desai said there’s an urgent need for ways to reduce overall cloud spending, and he believes Lucidity offers just what the doctor ordered. “It fundamentally transforms how enterprises manage and orchestrate their cloud storage infrastructure,” he said. “Its unparalleled platform increases storage efficiency and significantly reduces costs for customers of all sizes.”

Clearly, there are many enterprises that agree with that assessment, if Lucidity’s numbers are to be believed. The startup claims to have grown its revenue more than 400% in the last year, off an undisclosed base, adding dozens of Fortune 500 customers to its client list.

Looking forward, Lucidity aims to expand its go-to-market team to grow its revenue and expand into the world of object-based storage so it can help enterprises save even more money on their storage spending.

Photo: Lucidity